So, 2025… Will you finish us off or just leave us with ineradicable psychic and emotional scarring? Will our hyper-capitalist special economic zones ooze out to meet our hyper-capitalist freeports and offer us exciting new opportunities to be indentured serfs, or work abroad as trafficked persons, or perhaps just lurk dangerously in the depths of the very toxic harbour sludge that provoked our mutation into new, nauseating life forms. I hope I get fangs. I’ve always wanted fangs. And a tail.
Like many of you, I’m unsure if 2025 will be able to scar me emotionally – after the past decade, my soul already looks like Deadpool. That’s not the peak cute Ryan Reynolds at the start of the movie, or the snazzy mask and cool moves – I mean the naked wealed and welted freak with the face of a Halloween pumpkin in late December. What’s left to scar, 2025?
I know you’ll do your best, though, and perhaps you will host the final unfurling of the UK’s FAFO era – Farage Around and Find Out. Whether we dig out a new sub-basement to hell’s deepest circle rests partly in the hands of Elon “Space Karen” Musk, who’s busy gridlocking the US government, but will officially become the de facto Goblin King of Everywhere at roughly noon on 20 January. Thereafter, Xitter will shake off its remaining sane users and simply become a vast international Ouija board, amplifying the worst afterthoughts of the world’s worst people. A ridiculous wedge of Elon’s cash may even wing its way to Reform and the lovely Nige, because our democracy is nothing if not Very Much for Sale. And I’m sure at least some of that money will be spent on campaigning. Just when we thought we’d heard every possible variation on the theme of Greed and Stupid Racism Will Fix Everything, there will be new talking points – Sea Level Rises Caused by Combined Weight of Non-Poppy-Wearing Bastards. Or maybe – Novel Polio Epidemic Definitely Traced to Atheists Who Hate the King.
But 2025 won’t break me with that. I know the golden rule – Every Accusation Is a Confession. So, for example, everyone who says I’m being replaced by a minority, in fact represents the tiny, super-rich minority trashing economies for sport and population reduction, convinced there are both too many Wrong People and not enough White Serfs and Billionaire Organ Donor Clones. That minority has the ability to replace me with AI, three drones in a coat, or maybe just a cardboard cutout of someone smiling.
Deprived of healthcare by a minority? I am – by the minority who’ve undermined the NHS, while handing it over to corporations like UnitedHealth. You’ll have noticed UnitedHealth is so popular in the US that when one of its senior executives was assassinated recently the public reaction was not one of unalloyed mourning. Seriously – people were happy. That’s how bad their healthcare is – the same healthcare Shiny Wes says will save us.
Swindled by a minority? Oh, where to begin. Our country’s infrastructure was sold off for a song – I hate to think which song – and its new owners have been underserving us and profit-taking ever since, leaving us deeply in the shit. Every kind of shit. My culture undermined by a minority? 2025 may see the collapse of multiple universities, of more theatres and arts spaces, the loss of more arts qualifications and training opportunities, of more quality BBC content… The list is long. Meanwhile, the internet will continue stoking a culture of stochastic terrorism, antisocial behaviour and self-harming fictions. Those with the most power to support living, working, profitable, valuable and expressive culture here are simply watching it die, while cutting it off from overseas funding. You know, like every other area of the economy apart from our vampire financial sector and the allied – and vociferous – sector occupied by millionaires who own farms for personal reasons and coincidental tax avoidance. Or, as the Mail would describe them, humble smallholders, scraping by on a few beetroot, love of the soil and the rental properties occupying the soil and perhaps a meagre annual harvest of book deals and documentaries.
It’s all going to hurt. But we’re used to it now, ready and wily. We know people with air fryers. Mythologies about the feckless poor aside, someone juggling multiple pseudo-jobs while trying to find cheap food that isn’t a dodgy import or homegrown and gleaming with ominous residues, someone pondering which appliance to turn on this week – they’re a survival specialist. Our dying country and our dying world are mostly in the hands of underqualified nepo babies and grifters destined to fail upwards, abandoning every fire they’ve started, and kicking through drifts of our money like kids in autumn leaves. The future can seem bleak. And the majority can seem weak. But we’re not.
Need to know even more about survival? Drop in at a refugee support centre like the splendid Refuweegee and talk to the expats from countries other than Britain, people who have endured the unimaginable and not abandoned hope. Talk to domestic abuse survivors, to street homeless people, to people who are mocked and hated for simply existing. They’re still here – alive, against the odds. We’re all still here with an unmet obligation to help and learn from one another.
Democracy’s opponents can only buy help. They lack more than imagination. They lack hope, joy, love. They make do with hate, the repetition of hate and the anger that defends it, the anger that keeps them from their shame and fear, their awful, fundamental poverty.
In hopeless times, we can never afford to lose hope. When we feel beaten, we can take a breath and love: a word, a view, a dog, a dream, a person, a hope. We can act and work and hope like citizens of a better country, a better time. We can make 2025 find out there’s a power in that.
AL Kennedy’s new novel, Alive in the Merciful Country by A.L. Kennedy (£18.99) is published by Saraband on 9 January. To support the Guardian and Observer, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
